Aims: (1.) to evaluate the historical development of a selected area, using certain indicators computed by Patch Analyst and Fragstas, (2.) to critically evaluate the possibility of using these indicators for landscape planning, (3.) to define the main factors driving the historical changes of landscape structure and to characterize changes in landscape function, and (4.) to propose an improvement of the current state of the area. Map layers including current and past landscape structures were produced using ArcGIS 9.2. Proposed have also been extreme variants of land use, its variants with an increased occurrence of shrubs, and layers showing crops cultivated in the area in the years 2003 - 2009. Some metrics were computed simultaneously by Patch Analyst and Fragstats and the outputs of both programs were compared. The data obtained were treated using STATISTICA 8.

A tarefa de avaliar a produção científica de um pesquisador é fortemente baseada na análise de seu currículo. É o que fazem, por exemplo, as agências de fomento à pesquisa e desenvolvimento ou comissões de avaliação, quando necessitam considerar a produção científica dos pesquisadores no processo de concessão de bolsas e auxílios, na seleção de consultores e membros de comitês, na aprovação de projetos ou simplesmente para avaliar o conceito de um programa de pós-graduação. Nesse contexto, a modelagem de perfis de pesquisadores é tarefa fundamental, especialmente quando se quer avaliar a reputação dos pesquisadores. Isto pode ocorrer por meio de um processo de análise da trajetória de toda a carreira científica do pesquisador. Tal processo envolve não somente aspectos relacionados a artigos ou livros publicados, mas também por outros elementos inerentes à atividade de um pesquisador, como orientações de trabalhos de mestrado e de doutorado; participação em defesas de mestrado e de doutorado; trabalhos apresentados em conferências; participação em projetos de pesquisa, inserção internacional, dentre outros. O objetivo deste trabalho é especificar um modelo de perfil de pesquisadores (Rep- Model) e uma métrica para medir reputação acadêmica (Rep-Index). O processo de modelagem do perfil envolve a definição de quais informações são relevantes para a especificação do perfil e as apresenta por meio de 18 elementos e 5 categorias. O processo para medir a reputação do pesquisador é definido por uma métrica que gera um índice. Esse índice é calculado mediante a utilização dos elementos constantes no perfil do pesquisador. Para avaliar a abordagem proposta na tese, diversos experimentos foram realizados. Os experimentos envolveram a avaliação dos elementos do Rep-Model por meio de análise de correlação e por algoritmos de mineração de dados. O Rep-Index também foi avaliado e correlacionado com duas métricas amplamente utilizadas na comunidade científica, o h-index e o g-index. Como baseline, foram utilizados todos os pesquisadores do CNPq das áreas de Ciência da Computação, Economia e Odontologia. O trabalho desenvolvido nesta tese está inserido no contexto da identificação da reputação de pesquisadores no âmbito acadêmico. A abordagem desta tese tem como premissa ser abrangente e adaptável, pois envolve a vida científica do pesquisador construída ao longo de sua carreira científica e pode ser utilizada em diferentes áreas e em diferentes contextos. / The task of evaluating the scientific production of a researcher is based strongly on the analysis of their curriculum. It's what makes the agencies for research support or evaluation committees, when they need to consider the scientific production of researchers in the process of awarding grants and aid in the selection of consultants and committee members in approving projects or simply to assess the concept of a program graduate. In that context, the modeling of profiles of researchers is fundamental task especially when one wants to evaluate the reputation of the researchers. This can occur by means of a process of analysis of the trajectory of all the scientific career of the researcher. Such process involves not only aspects related to papers or books, but also other elements inherent in the activity of a researcher, as orientations of master’s degree and doctorate; participation in defense of master's and doctoral degrees; papers presented in conferences, participation in research projects, international integration, among others. This proposal specifies a profile template for researchers (Rep-Model) and a metric to measure academic reputation (Rep-Index). The profile modeling process involves define which information is relevant to the specification of the profile and shows through 18 elements and 5 categories. The process for measuring researcher's reputation is defined by a metric that generates an index. This index is calculated by using the information contained in the profile of the researcher. To evaluate the approach proposed in the thesis, extensive experiments were conducted. The experiments involved the evaluation of Rep-Model by means of correlation analysis and data mining algorithms. The Rep-Index was also evaluated and correlated with two metrics widely used in the scientific community, the h-index and gindex. As a baseline, all of CNPq researchers in the areas of Computer Science, Economics and Dentistry were used. The work in this thesis is set in the context of identifying the reputation of researchers within the academic sphere. The approach of this thesis is premised be comprehensive and adaptable, because it involves the life science researcher built throughout his scientific career and can be used in different research areas and in different contexts.

Esta dissertação descreve um conjunto de ferramentas, VEasy, o qual foi desenvolvido especificamente para auxiliar no processo de Verificação Funcional. VEasy contém quatro módulos principais, os quais realizam tarefas-chave do processo de verificação como linting, simulação, coleta/análise de cobertura e a geração de testcases. Cada módulo é comentado em detalhe ao longo dos capítulos. Todos os módulos são integrados e construídos utilizando uma Interface Gráfica. Esta interface possibilita o uso de uma metodologia de criação de testcases estruturados em camadas, onde é possível criar casos de teste complexos através do uso de operações do tipo drag-and-drop. A forma de uso dos módulos é exemplificada utilizando projetos simples escritos em Verilog. As funcionalidades da ferramenta, assim como o seu desempenho, são comparadas com algumas ferramentas comerciais e acadêmicas. Assim, algumas conclusões são apresentadas, mostrando que o tempo de simulação é consideravelmente menor quando efetuada a comparação com as ferramentas comerciais e acadêmicas. Os resultados também mostram que a metodologia é capaz de permitir um alto nível de automação no processo de criação de testcases através do modelo baseado em camadas. / This thesis describes a tool suite, VEasy, which was developed specifically for aiding the process of Functional Verification. VEasy contains four main modules that perform linting, simulation, coverage collection/analysis and testcase generation, which are considered key challenges of the process. Each of those modules is commented in details throughout the chapters. All the modules are integrated and built on top of a Graphical User Interface. This framework enables the testcase automation methodology which is based on layers, where one is capable of creating complex test scenarios using drag-anddrop operations. Whenever possible the usage of the modules is exemplified using simple Verilog designs. The capabilities of this tool and its performance were compared with some commercial and academic functional verification tools. Finally, some conclusions are drawn, showing that the overall simulation time is considerably smaller with respect to commercial and academic simulators. The results also show that the methodology is capable of enabling a great deal of testcase automation by using the layering scheme.

abstract: Research has demonstrated that temperature and relative humidity substantially influence overall perceptions of indoor air quality (Fang, Clausen, & Fanger, 1998). This finding places temperature quality as a high priority, especially for vulnerable adults over 60. Temperature extremes and fluctuation, as well as the perception of those conditions, affect physical performance, thermal comfort and health of older adults (Chatonnet & Cabanac, 1965, pp. 185-6; Fumiharu, Watanabe, Park, Shephard, & Aoyagi, 2005; Heijs & Stringer, 1988). The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) have developed thermal-comfort standards for working-age, healthy individuals. None of these standards address the physiological and psychological needs of older adults (ASHRAE Standard 55, 2010; ISO-7730, 2005). This dissertation investigates the impacts of thermal conditions on self-reported health and perceived comfort for older adults, hypothesizing that warmer and more-table indoor thermal conditions will increase the health and perceived comfort of these adults. To this end, a new set of thermal comfort metrics was designed and tested to address the thermal preferences of older adults. The SENIOR COMFORT Metrics 2013 outlined new thresholds for optimal indoor high and low temperatures and set limits on thermal variability over time based on the ASHRAE-55 2010 model. This study was conducted at Sunnyslope Manor, a multi-unit, public-housing complex in the North Phoenix. Nearly 60% (76 of 118) of the residents (aged 62-82) were interviewed using a 110-question, self-reporting survey in 73 apartment units. A total of 40 questions and 20 sub-questions addressing perceptions of comfort, pain, sleep patterns, injuries, and mood were extracted from this larger health condition survey to assess health and thermal comfort. Indoor environmental thermal measurements included temperature in three locations: kitchen, living area, and bedroom and data were recorded every 15 minutes over 5 full days and 448 points. Study results start to indicate that older adults for Sunnyslope Manor preferred temperatures between 76 and 82.5 degrees Fahrenheit and that lower temperatures as outlined by ASHRAE-55 2010 increases the rate of injuries and mood changes in older adults among other findings. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Architecture 2013

Nowadays more and more IT companies switch to the distributed development model. This trend has a number of advantages and disadvantages, which are studied by researchers through different aspects of the modern code development. One of such aspects is code review, which is used by many companies and produces a big amount of data. A number of studies describe different data mining and data analysis approaches, which are based on a link between code review data and performance. According to these studies analysis of the code review data can give a good insight to the development performance and help software companies to detect a number of performance issues and improve the quality of their code. The main goal of this Thesis was to collect reported knowledge about the code review data analysis and implement a solution, which will help to perform such analysis in a real industrial setting. During the performance of the research the author used multiple research techniques, such as Snowballing literature review, Case study and Semi-structured interviews. The results of the research contain a list of code review data metrics, extracted from the literature and a software tool for collecting and visualizing data. The performed literature review showed that among the literature sources, related to the code review, relatively small amount of sources are related to the topic of the Thesis, which exposes a field for a future research. Application of the found metrics showed that most of the found metrics are possible to use in the context of the studied environment. Presentation of the results and interviews with company's representatives showed that the graphic plots are useful for observing trends and correlations in development of company's development sites and help the company to improve its performance and decision making process.

This thesis evaluates a method for system security assessment (MASS), developed at the Swedish Defence Research Agency in Linköping. The evaluation has been carried out with the use of scenarios, consisting of three example networks and several modifications of those. The results from the scenarios are then compared to the expectations of the author and a general discussion is taken about whether or not the results are realistic. The evaluation is not meant to be exhaustive, so even if MASS had passed the evaluation with flying colors, it could not have been regarded as proof that the method works as intended. However, this was not the case; even though MASS responded well to the majority of the modifications, some issues indicating possible adjustments or improvements were found and commented on in this report. The conclusion from the evaluation is therefore that there are issues to be solved and that the evaluated version of MASS is not ready to be used to evaluate real networks. The method has enough promise not to be discarded, though. With the aid of the issues found in this thesis, it should be developed further, along with the supporting tools, and be re-evaluated.

Nowadays, assessing software quality and making predictions about the software are not possible. Software metrics are useful tools for assessing software quality and for making predictions. But currently the interpretation of the measured values is based on personal experience. In order to be able to assess software quality, quantitative data has to be obtained. VizzAnalyzer is a program for analyzing open source Java Projects. It can be used for collecting quantitative data for defining thresholds that can support the interpretation of the measurement values. It helps to assess software quality by calculating over 20 different software metrics. I define a process for obtaining, storing and maintaining software projects. I have used the defined process to analyze 60-80 software projects delivering a large database with quantitative data.

The VizzAnalyzer Framework is a stand-alone tool for analyzing and visualizing the structures of large software systems. Today, it has its own limited Swing based GUI lacking a professional look & feel. Furthermore, the effort needed to extend the VizzAnalyzer with new features like automatic update, progress monitoring, help system, and integration of the Eclipse Java and C/C++ AST API is high. In order to improve current limitations and ease the future maintenance effort we refactored the VizzAnalyzer to be a plug-in to the Eclipse platform. We removed the burden of GUI development from the authors of the VizzAnalyzer replacing the Swing GUI with a SWT based GUI, which utilizes the rich feature set provided by the Eclipse Platform. Furthermore, the we did not only provide existing features of the VizzAnalyzer as loading and binding graphs, a complex system to load dynamic plug-ins functionalities for analysis, retrieval and visualization. We implemented an update and help manager, allowed for an easy use of third party plug-ins, which are available for Eclipse, and provided product branding. We propose that the newly created VizzAnalyzer 2.0 solved the aforementioned limitations and provides a good foundation for the future evolution of the VizzAnalyzer tool. This master thesis documents our how the VizzAnalyzer 2.0 has been developed and implemented for the Eclipse platform, and how developers shall use the new VizzAnalyzer version.

The validation of software quality metrics lacks statistical significance. One reason for this is that the data collection requires quite some effort. To help solve this problem, we develop tools for metrics analysis of a large number of software projects (146 projects with ca. 70.000 classes and interfaces and over 11 million lines of code). Moreover, validation of software quality metrics should focus on relevant metrics, i.e., correlated metrics need not to be validated independently. Based on our statistical basis, we identify correlation between several metrics from well-known objectoriented metrics suites. Besides, we present early results of typical metrics values and possible thresholds.

Os rumos atuais da competição e da tecnologia justificam a crescente utilização de indicadores para a gestão dos recursos produtivos nas organizações industriais. Nesta linha de pensamento, o presente trabalho discorre sobre as principais abordagens relacionadas com gestão competitiva, construção de indicadores e métodos de custeio, disponíveis na literatura. Com base no modelo gerencial do Prof. Nigel Slack, para agregar vantagem competitiva na manufatura, é desenvolvido um sistema de indicadores integrados para a gestão do custeio e das atividades de manutenção. O modelo de gestão é validado por intermédio de um estudo de caso real e os resultados obtidos demonstram a eficácia do sistema de indicadores no monitoramento das atividades de manutenção nas empresas industriais. / The current trend in terms of world-wide competition and technological skills justify the increasing utilization of constant up-to-date information and decision-making data in manufacturing organizations. Accordingly, this work discusses the major contributions related to a world-class management, performance metrics and costing methods. Based on Nigel Slack’s management model proposed to increase competitiveness, an inter-related performance metrics system is developed, aiming to reduce maintenance cost and to improve the overall maintenance activities management. The management techniques proposed in this research is validated by its application in a real manufacturing company, selected for a case-study. This research shows that the data collected allows statistical analysis and helps a plant management team to get important conclusions about the effectiveness of the performance metrics proposed for maintenance management.